Coal and Switches in Zend's Stocking This Year

So here it is — December. We’ve got a shiny new PHP 5.1.1, which as been anticipated for weeks, at least. (I’d been expecting its release any day for a good 2-3 weeks before it finally shipped.) We’ve also got a zippy new Firefox 1.5 release, another project whose release was fairly well telegraphed and expected for the last month.

And then we’ve got Zend Studio, a cornerstone of “The PHP Company”. After upgrading to PHP 5.1.1 and Firefox 1.5 this week, I was been shocked to discover that Zend Studio 5 and the Zend Studio Firefox Plug-In are both in a state of rectal-cranial inversion: neither Zend Studio 5 or the Firefox Plug-In are expected to support PHP 5.1.1 or Firefox 1.5 until late December/early January.

So, I won’t be able to leverage the holiday lull to really hammer on projects in PHP 5.1.1 using the Zend tools I’ve come to rely on.

And get this: Zend’s own product website for Zend Studio 5 claims support for All PHP Versions, and the Zend Studio Firefox Plug-In boldly claims to support Firefox 0.9 and above.

In reality, however, Zend Support’s reaction to my support tickets raising these incompatibility issues was essentially: huh? Oh man, give us a month.

There’s absolutely no excuse for this delay that can be considered acceptable for a company who claims to be “The PHP Company.” Perhaps Santa will leave a clue under the tree for these guys.